Sarah Court Read online

  He’s got a young guy in tow. Look of an Upper Canadian boarding school preppie. Jeans with scorpions embroidered down each leg. Dreadlocked hair. Puppydoggin’ Colin’s heels. My son draws me into a rough hug. His fingers trace my spine clinically.

  “This is Parkhurst,” he says. “He’s writing my biography.”

  The kid biographer smiles. You’d think we’d shared a moment.

  “What’s that doing out, Dad?”

  That is a sand-cast West Highland Terrier. Its head got busted off by vandals but I epoxied it back on. Colin’s mother collected Westie paraphernalia. We had a live one but he went young of liver failure and convinced my wife she was snakebitten as a pet owner. Her accumulation had been slow and it was only afterwards, sitting in a house full of effigies, that I realized how ardent a collector she’d been.

  “Pretty morbid,” says Colin.

  The cancer ate away her sense of things. Last few months she lived in a terminal dreamworld: drugs, mainly, plus the disease chewing into the wires of her brain. She wasn’t wholly my wife. She’d damn me for thinking otherwise. During this time, she— “Mom treated that dog like it was real,” Colin tells Parkhurst. “Fed it biscuits. Don’t know why you’d want it around.”

  My son’s generation has a manner of plainspeaking that comes off as casual brutality. Why do I keep it? It maintains a vision. Not of my wife feeding a sculpture because her brain was so corrupted she couldn’t tell it from a real dog. It’s that she tried to nurture anything at all. Out of all the hours spent with her in good health, why would he conjure the scene of his mother feeding a sculpted dog? “You want me to throw a towel over it?” “A man does as he likes in his own home.” “Gee, you’re a prince amongst men.”

  Colin looks raggedy and he looks dog tired. Sad, I’d say—not pitiful: even mummified in bandages in this or that hospital, the boy’s never been that—but depressed. I could cover it . . . why should I? Where’s he been? Dog could damnwell stay.

  “How did you find me?”

  “We stopped in for an eye-opener at the Queenston Motel. There was Fletcher Burger propping up a stool. Poor guy’s looking like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag.”

  He glances at Parkhurst to ensure he’s transcribed this morsel of wit.

  “What brings you?”

  “Can’t I visit my Pops?”

  Already sick of the tension. Wish I had a beer but balk at drinking in front of my kid and besides, I’m pretty sure they’re all drank up. He shifts on his rump and, with reticence or the nearest to it my son might ever draw, says: “I’m going over.”

  Sarah Court, where Colin grew up, kids had pet squirrels.

  My neurosurgeon neighbour Frank Saberhagen cut down a tree. A clutch of baby squirrels tumbled out. The doctor’s corgi devoured a few before Clara Russell’s sheepdog rescued the remainder. Our kids took them in. The hardware store had a run on heatlamps.

  Semi-domesticated squirrels roamed the court. A virulent strain of cestoda, a parasitic flatworm, infested their guts. Saberhagen saw his son Nick clawing his keister and organized for the Inoculation Wagon. To make sure our kids were infected we had to bring samples.

  Neighbours idling on the sidewalk with tupperware containers or ice cream tubs containing our offsprings’ turds. Everybody shamefaced except Saberhagen, who took evident pride in his son’s heroic sample. Wasn’t flashing it around or anything so crass but you could tell. Everyone felt sorry for his son Nick, who went on to become a boxer but not a very good one.

  The Inoculation Wagon: room enough for Colin, myself, a nurse. Colin hopped on the butcherpapered bench. Shivered. Two kinds of shivers: the fear-shiver and the shiver of anticipation. First time I’d ever marked a clear distinction.

  “This is Verminox,” the nurse told Colin.

  “What’s it do?”

  “It’s a bit of a disease. We inject you with a teenytiny bit, your body fights it. The worms can’t fight. They die.”

  “Gonna make me sick?”

  “A little sick so you won’t get a lot sick.”

  Colin rucked his sleeve up. Fascinated he’d be infected. The nurse gave me a look. But it was heartening to see my boy cleansed of fear. All the other pansy kids blubbering as my son practically jumped onto that hogsticker.

  Later I recognized parents should be thankful their kid is like everyone else’s in the most critical ways. Pricked with a needle, they cry.

  “A prototype, Pops.”

  “Prototype? It’s a plastic oil drum.”

  “I got people working on a better one.”

  Ball’s Falls is located off old highway 24 in the shadow of the escarpment. The sun slants through clifftop pines highlighting the schist trickling through the rockface. Only vehicle in the lot is a delivery van. SWEETS FOR THE SWEET on its flank. Bark on silver birches peeling like the skin of blistered feet.

  Colin boots the drum down the drywash where a waterwheel churns the creek. Parkhurst has pillows stolen from the Four Diamonds motel where they’ve been shacked up. Next to the KOA campground so when funds run short it will be a painless transition. Colin’s earned a chunk over the years: those TV specials in the ’90s, action dolls, video games. Tells me he’s been working the state fair circuit lately. Jumping junked cars in razed Iowa cornfields. Junked cars in Idaho potato patches.

  “You got scientists building you another drum?” I ask. “What, it’s going to have non-motel pillows for superior cushioning?”

  “I got people, Pops.”

  “Don’t call me that. Pops. Like I’m running a malt shop.”

  “You’ll see it.”

  “Who says?”

  I’ll see it. Take this morning: said I wouldn’t come but here I am. My refusal wouldn’t stop it happening. What if he busts a leg? Pulverizes his spine? Parkhurst bawling into his ratty mop of hair. The real thumbscrews part is that Colin knows he’s putting me in a bind.

  He boots the drum down a gulch littered with sunbleached paper cups. We reach the shallows near the head of the falls. Water clear over the flat shale bottom. Minnows dart and settle. A fifty-foot drop into a deep rock amphitheater. My son strips to his skivs. Goddammit, it’s autumn. What’s the purpose in him going over as he entered this world? Wearing ballhugger Y-fronts—a banana hammock, I guess you’d have to call it—presenting the shrivelled definition of his privates. Gawking at my kid’s frightened turtle of a wiener. Hell’s the matter with me?

  “It’s not watertight,” he tells me. “Why ride home with wet clothes?”

  My son, the pragmatic daredevil. Settling into the drum, he sighs. Can’t tell if it’s voluntary or if the compression of those old hurts forces it out.

  Muffled laughter as the drum bobs into the current. Follow it upcreek, skipping over rocks with a galloping heart until it bottoms out at the head of the falls. Water booms over the creek-neck but Colin’s hooting like a wild bastard. I find a strong branch. Goddamn, sixty years old and aiming to tip my half-naked son over a waterfall in an oil drum. The sun’s at an angle where I see him through the blue plastic: an embryo inside an egg held up to a flame.

  Water sprays. Parkhurst’s overbalanced with one boot submerged in the creek. The stone he’s thrown is sand-coloured, huge, and sharp. It could have easily punctured the drum.

  “What to Christ were you thinking?”

  Parkhurst offers the docile smile of a moron. A surge sweeps the drum over. I hightail it down steps erected by the Ontario Tourism Board. The drum floats near the basin’s shore. Lid popped off. Colin crawling out like some zombie from its grave. Soaked skivs hanging off his rawbone ass. Water-thinned blood trickling out both nostrils. Smiling but that’s no sign of anything.

  “Give me your hand.”

  He crawls out under his own steam. On the high side of the basin a deer watches in a poplar stand. Tiny red spider mites teem around each of its eyes, so many as to give the impression it’s weeping blood. Colin’s shivering. Nobody thought to bring a blanket.

>   Back in the truck I get the heater pumping. Parkhurst I banish to the bed.

  “I want you there.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “So un-retire, Daddio.”

  Heat’s making me sluggish. Flask’s in the glovebox but it’s too early for that sort of a pick-meup in the company of my kid.

  “A hell of a thing to ask, sonnio.”

  He’s genuinely baffled. “All’s you got to do is fish me out.”

  A reporter once asked: “When’s the last time you saw your son scared?”

  I said that must have been at his circumcision. It was taken as a joke.

  One time he had a baby tooth hanging by a strip of sinew. He tied it to a length of dental floss, attached the trailing end a doorknob, tore it out. That night he locked himself in the bathroom and tore out four more. Came out looking like a Gatineau junior hockey league goon. He wrapped his teeth in tinfoil for the fairy. My wife figured a fiver ought to cover it.

  Another time on a Cub Scout camping trip. My neighbour Frank Saberhagen was scoutmaster, myself a chaperone. Nighttime round the fire. Boys tossing pine cones on the flames to hear sap hiss.

  “The Nepalese army trained the most fearsome warriors in the world,” Saberhagen went. “The Gurkhas. Make the Marines look like a pack of ninnies. They got this knife, the kherkis, so long and wickedly sharp victims see their own neck spurting blood as they die. What nobody knows is a planeload of Gurkhas crashed on this site years ago.”

  For a man who’d sworn the Hippocratic oath, Frank was unusually irresponsible.

  “Who knows if they’re still alive? What the Gurkhas do is sneak into camp at night and feel your boots. If they’re laced over-under-over, they identify you as a friend. But if they’re laced straight across, they pull out their big ole kherkis and”—drawing a thumb across his throat—“you see your own bloody neck stump as you die.”

  Afterwards I upbraided Saberhagen. He denied any wrongdoing.

  “The Ghurkas are real, Wes. Go look it up.”

  The boys all re-laced their shoes over-under-over. I assumed Colin had done likewise until I saw his boots outside his tent the following morning. Laced straight across.

  Somewhere inside myself I knew he’d been up all night, Swiss Army knife clutched in one hand, listening for the scrunch-scrunch of feet on dead leaves.

  I’m in the truck with Colin’s biographer, Parkhurst. Shorthills provincial park. Sulphur Springs road. A weekly circuit. Fletcher Burger has been tagging along since his troubles but he didn’t pick up when I rang this morning. Parkhurst overheard and asked to tag along. I’d prefer to share my truck with Typhoid Mary.

  Colin’s crashing on my couch. Parkhurst curled at his feet like an Irish setter. Colin’s working my phone to drum up media. A “strong maybe” from a cub reporter at the Globe and Mail. Wondrous he’d consider committing to the two-hour drive to witness my son heave himself off the face of the earth. My involvement’s being hyped.

  “Yeah, yeah. Been at it thirty years,” Colin’s saying to anyone who’ll listen. “His dad before and his dad before that. He’ll be there to drag whatever’s left out . . .”

  The sun slits through roadside poplars. Feel of cocktail swords stabbing my corneas. Scan for bodies: tough on corduroy roads as they get squashed between raw timbers and all’s you can identify them by is the crushed eggshell of their skulls. Parkhurst smiling that sunny mongoloid’s smile. A face pocked with old acne scars looking like a bag of suet pecked at by hungry jays. By no means charitable but some men invite uncharitable descriptions. Snap on the radio. If it’s quiet enough I might hear the kid’s thoughts, which I envision as sounding much like a boom microphone set inside a tub of mealworms.

  Other night I drag myself out of bed in the wee witching hours. Lumbago playing havoc with my spine. Went to the fridge for a barley pop. There was Parkhurst standing over my son. When I asked what he was doing he gave me his doleful emptyheaded look.

  “Thought he’d stop breathing, or . . .”

  A smashed septum made Colin snore loud as a leaf-blower. It hit me what the kid said. Not stopped breathing—as in, he was worried. Stop breathing— as in, he wanted to witness the dying breath exit his lungs.

  If a man makes his living courting death, is it any surprise he should acquire as companion a human maggot waiting to feast on the inevitable?

  “Colin said you went to university,” he said now.

  “Jot that down in your notebook, did you? I majored in geology.”

  “So why don’t you teach it, or . . .”

  He’s one of those annoying nitwits who never finishes a sentence.

  “My wife got pregnant. Needed a job. I became an employee of the Parks Commission.”

  “Good money, or is it like . . .”

  “I could walk into a Big Bee, buy a scratch-off ticket, get three cherries and instantly make more than I’ve ever made doing this. I weld, mainly.”

  “Funny the way it’ll go.”

  “Yep, it’s a regular rib-ticklin’ riot. My split sides are always aching.”

  “I know how that goes, or sorta like . . .”

  Moron. I check up by a thatch of duckweed. A possum had bumbled onto the road to avoid black flies. Most get clipped by a fender and thrown clear but this one got run over square. Hind end squashed. Muzzle stuck with cockleburrs.

  “Tourist Thoroughfare Maintenance” the Parks Commission designates it, gussying up what is simply road-kill duty. The grim sight of Mr. Possum here, or Mr. Racoon or Ms. Badger or Monsieur Skunk— any critter who goes jelly-kneed when pinned by arc-sodium headlights—is a guaranteed vacationspoiler. Call me the merry maid of the roads.

  I reach a shovel out the bed. Parkhurst’s kneeling a foot from the creature. He fails to note the term “playing possum” was coined after observing such behaviour.

  “Hold a mirror under its snout,” I tell him. “Fogs up you’ll know it’s alive. The fact it’ll have torn your throat to ribbons will be your second hint.”

  He finds a stick. Stabs the possum’s flanks. The animal rears up over its own squandered wreckage. Crazed hissing noises. Its crack-glazed eyes make me think of the Christmas tree ornaments Colin made in grade school. Glass globes with tissue paper paraffined over top. I found them years later, shrunken tissue peeled back from the glass in veins. The fucking kid pokes it again. Bringing my boot down, I snap his stick. His face may’ve found its way into the beast’s wheelhouse—jam it in a Cuisinart for similar results—if I hadn’t shouldered him aside.

  “We wanted to see if it was alive. One poke beyond is being an asshole.”

  The kill-box is the size of a laundry hamper. Lightweight aluminum. Drill holes let the fumes go. A slot-and-grove mechanism for bigger animals so’s you can finagle their heads inside. Set the possum in whole. Lock it down. Uncoil the hose. Fasten one end over the tailpipe. Screw the trailing end onto the connecting tube feeding the box. Slide onto the driver’s seat. Goose the gas. Carbon dioxide pumps in. Black slivers—possum claws—poke through the drill-holes roped in smoke.

  Colin would send his mother and I news clippings. One showed his body laid out as an anatomical graph. Skinless, as rendered by some magazine’s crackerjack graphics department.

  The Wreckage of Daredevil Colin “Brink Of ” Hill. Numbered arrows pointed to the bone-breaks and contusions and pulped cartilage and shorn tendons and detached retinas and assorted devastation. So many goddamn arrows.

  1. Brink Of tore his left kneecap off in a motocross fiasco at the Tallahassee Motor Oval.

  2. Brink Of knocked out seven teeth smashing though a plate-glass window as Charles Bronson’s stunt double in Death Wish V: The Face of Death.

  Another time I got a package in the mail. A video game unit with his game: Daredevil. He’d been showing up on late-night talkshows. A TV stunt spectacular where he’d recreated Evil Knieval’s Snake River Gorge jump. I called him.

  “Daddio!”

  “Where are you?”


  “Partying in Los Angeles!”

  I visualized the standard LA pool with underwater lights shimmering the surface, the same pools over the Hollywood Hills so if you were to observe from on high the landscape would resemble a luminous coral fan. Bareassed girls, starlets as they were known, swimming carefree but not truly, needing their nakedness to be appreciated and the party given a whimsical theme: Christmas in July; Holiday Under the Sea. My son far away from the stink of the killbox and the GM fabrication plant where radial tire moulds are injection-moulded with molten vulcanized rubber: that first nostrilful of air entering Canadian Tire intensified twentyfold. Far away from the rusted skies over the dry docks where men bent the blue of acetylene torches to braise hulls of ships whose prows would cleave the sea places we never dreamt of going. When the whistle blew we showered silently, white holes showing through wetted hair where stray sparks burnt down to our scalps. Colin achieved escape velocity. Who could ever hold that against him?

  “Try it, Dad. Try the game.”

  I picked up the joystick. A digital version of Colin tooled along on a motorbike. His voice came out the speakers:

  “Yeehaaaaaw! C’mon, chicken-guts, give ’er some gas!”

  The bike went up a ramp, landed badly, tossed Colin over the handlebars. He skipped along in a broke-boned jig. A tiny ambulance sped across the screen. GAME OVER.

  “Ragdoll physics,” Colin said. “How they get me flipping and flapping. Lifelike! A hit in Japan; they love me over th—”

  His phone cut out. Or I hung up. I don’t properly recall.

  The gal, all of twenty, she’s up on the parquet stage grinding her bits on a brass pole.

  Pageboy hairdo, jet-black and futuristic like an android’s haircut. Giving us goons that witchywoman stare they must teach at the stripper academy. Lithe and firm-delted. Could’ve been a gymnast or figure skater . . . my mind shouldn’t have gone down that route because I’m imagining her mother dropping her off at the rink with a pair of pink skates hung over her shoulders. Eating a Pop Tart. Now she’s up there in the buff doing the higgeldy-piggeldy.